


hair in your mouth, teeth down the drain (80s coke party)

by evanines



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Alcohol, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emetophobia, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Other, Sensory Overload, juno needs and gets a hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-08
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-14 08:08:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29913927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evanines/pseuds/evanines
Summary: “He knew she was still talking because the ring in his ears was becoming an acoustic lobotomy that ripped through his brain’s tissue indiscriminately. He didn’t know what she was saying. It was too loud and too quiet at the same time, lost in the sheer everything around him.The dress was too tight around his shoulders. He pulled on the hemline to keep it from riding up, feeling the fabric against his skin, rubbing the mesh between two fingers almost unconsciously. In half a second, the already short dress was ripped at the hem where he’d worried the delicate fabric away. He’s holding something in his other hand, he realizes as he looks down. A silver card, innocuously reflecting the iridescent lights. There’s a name on it. It’s not his, at least he doesn’t think so. “Juno has an attack of sensory overload while on a job that feels... a bit too familiar.
Relationships: Peter Nureyev/Juno Steel, Vespa Ilkay & Peter Nureyev
Comments: 4
Kudos: 69





	hair in your mouth, teeth down the drain (80s coke party)

**Author's Note:**

> See the end for specific trigger warnings

The air around him was heavy, filled with neon haze and sex and designer drugs. Juno’s stomach turned just standing there, loud music shaking his legs through the sticky black floor, unsteady on high-heeled shoes. Strobing intercut the writhing crowd, casting them in a shaky stop-motion of depravity. The offset pounding of music and lights ricochet through his brain, bouncing off the walls of his skull with a bang, pulsing pain and light and noise until he can barely breathe. 

His head is cloudy, lost in the smoke surrounding him, reflecting the light in strange patterns that made his good eye lose direction. For a brief second, Juno found himself unable to tell up from down, lost in a limbo of bright music and loud lights and-- _get it together, Steel. Focus._

Juno forced himself to take a breath, short and shaky and filled with seven different substances, probably. He forced himself to look, focus his vision and pay attention to what was going on around him. It hurt… pretty much everything. That was temporary, he could power through it, hell, he had before, hundreds of times. 

The people lining the walls were daddy’s-money rich. It’s something that Juno, in his years as a detective (and now as a fledgling career criminal, he supposed) had learned pretty quickly to identify-- gaudy clothes that were tossed together without thought, dry-clean-only outfits that cost tens of thousands of creds ruined by equally expensive liquor and bodily fluids that were picked up in stark detail by blue-violet lights. 

He hated it. It felt disgustingly familiar, the way his feet stuck to the floor for a second before each step, the heady feeling in his gut, the pounding in his head. As he felt himself lose control again, step back into the passenger seat of his own goddamn head, the comms in his ear chirped on. 

“Juno, dear, what’s going on?” The voice felt familiar, clipped vowels and clinical pronunciation. Unfortunately for whoever was on the line, Juno wasn’t home right now. 

He knew she was still talking because the ring in his ears was becoming an acoustic lobotomy that ripped through his brain’s tissue indiscriminately. He didn’t know what she was saying. It was too loud and too quiet at the same time, lost in the sheer _everything_ around him. 

The dress was too tight around his shoulders. He pulled on the hemline to keep it from riding up, feeling the fabric against his skin, rubbing the mesh between two fingers almost unconsciously. In half a second, the already short dress was ripped at the hem where he’d worried the delicate fabric away. He’s holding something in his other hand, he realizes as he looks down. A silver card, innocuously reflecting the iridescent lights. There’s a name on it. It’s not his, at least he doesn’t think so. 

He’s glued in place, focused on that little card when he’s slammed into, feeling the shock in his bones almost, a startle a bit too close to terror. Cold seeps down his chest, and he looks down to see the champagne drip down the front of the too-tight dress and puddle at his feet. 

There’s a woman standing in front of him. No, that’s not right. The woman who’d bumped into him was standing in front of him. Her mouth was moving. Juno’s head feels like it’s been scooped out and filled with cotton. He stumbled past her, ignoring the way she waves her hands at him angrily, the indignant squawking of a rich kid being ignored drowned out by the ceaseless noise around them both. 

The bathroom smells like vomit and ammonia and chemical perfume and decomposing hair, putrid and earthy and artificially floral. It’s dark, thankfully, with half the bulbs blown out and the remaining few valiantly casting fluorescent circles on the graffitied stall doors. There’s a man there, on the floor. He’s got his head tilted back against the grimy wall. Juno thinks--hopes-- he’s breathing. That feeling of familiarity is breaching it’s way back into his chest again, a bastardized version of nostalgia that feels a lot more like dread. 

_The music pounds his ears as he shuts the bathroom door, a respite for a moment against the chaos. He looks at himself in the mirror. There’s black makeup running down his face from tears or sweat or--_

_He barely recognizes the way his cheeks sink in, the brick-red crust of dried blood under his nose, the bruises and bite marks on his neck. His pupils are blown so wide his eyes are almost black._

_There’s something in his throat, alien and intrusive. He retches into the sink. Nothing comes up. He sticks two fingers down his throat, a practiced motion he’d seen someone who looked a lot like himself do a thousand times. It feels familiar._

_There’s mascara running down his face and blood on his upper lip and he’s just pulled someone else’s hair out of his mouth. It’s a slimy, coarse feeling, the way it leaves his throat, and he coughs up dark spit into the cracked sink as it leaves. He thinks he might vomit._

“...Juno? Juno?” The noise coming through the comms pulls him out of the memory. Juno. It’s for him. This voice is different. A man, speaking softly, the way people speak to alley cats that are so dizzy with fear they’re ready to attack just to make it all _stop_. The voice says “Juno” again, and he blinks, hard, forcefully. 

_Peter_ . 

The recognition is enough to break Juno out of his silence, if only for a moment.

“Yeah?” 

His voice sounds like he’s hearing it from another room, not through his own chest. It’s strained, too quiet, too rough, about to crack under the wet pressure of tears he refuses to shed. 

The person on the other line-- no-- _Peter_ \-- takes a sharp breath in, vague static in Juno’s ear. 

“Juno, love, talk to me? What’s going on, where are you?” 

Where is he? He’s leaning shaky hands on a porcelain sink, looking at a face he barely recognizes in the mirror and breathing in that same smell of rot and bile. After a second too long, he speaks. 

“Um… bathroom?” 

“Good, Juno, thank you. Buddy’s been trying to talk to you for the last few minutes, what’s going on?” 

Peter’s being patient. Too patient. Juno knows when he gets like this it’s frustrating. When he gets quiet and distant and doesn’t respond and can’t work. He realizes then that the woman talking to him earlier must have been Buddy. 

_Shit, Steel, she’s gonna kill you._

Wait. Peter had asked him a question. 

“Sorry,” he says quietly, hating the way his mouth forms the word in the mirror, a cringe that bares his teeth like a cornered animal. 

“Nothing to be sorry for, love.” The way the name sounds in Peter’s voice, Juno thinks, might be the closest he ever gets to _holy_. 

Shit, he’s still talking. 

“Juno?” 

He bites down the nausea and manages to force words again. 

“I’m sorry, can you repeat that?” 

“Certainly. Did you get the keycard from the mark?” 

The card. Juno looks down at it, still clutched in his hand, champagne dried now and leaving a sticky sheen over the sleek metal. 

He remembers more, now, in the cold, heavy quiet of the bathroom. 

_He walked in, confident, making sure to step more boldly than usual, scanning the room with a sharply lined eye and catching the target._

_The woman’s iridescent catsuit, more cutout than fabric. The way she giggled, wrapped her arm around him, digging sharp nails into the meat of his shoulder. Leaving little red crescents in her wake. The booze on her breath and her dilated pupils and the way she purred into his ear as he laughed along, as he reached around and placed a steady hand on her lower back, feeling for the straight edge of metal he knew he’d find in her back pocket._

_The way he’d left her dry-heaving in the corner, her hair hanging limp over her face and her thin arms trembling._

The card was in his hand. He was in the bathroom. He was talking to Peter. Peter was talking. 

He had the card. 

“Yeah. I’ve got it.” 

He had the card, so it was okay. So they wouldn’t be that mad at him, because he didn’t _fail_ , right? 

Peter was on the other end talking, so it was okay. He vaguely hears Peter tell him _ten minutes, love, just hold on,_ as he stumbles out of the bathroom. 

Peter finds him on the curb, on his hands and knees, hair hanging in his face and arms trembling. His body shakes as he coughs onto wet asphalt, nothing coming up but air and a rhythmic, painful sound that makes Peter’s heart clench every time the lady chokes on nothing. 

He throws the Ruby 7 in park with a sharply uttered command, and almost falls out the door to crouch by Juno’s side. 

They sit like that for a moment, Peter hesitant to touch Juno for fear of making it worse. He pushes down that fear, tables it as a necessary risk, and rests a slender, cool hand against too-warm brown skin. 

“Juno, love? It’s me.” 

And they’re back in the car, and the seats are pushed back so Juno can pull his knees to his chest and stare blankly out the windshield at the way the streetlights paint neon on slick pavement. 

Peter speaks, and gets no response. His detective looks at him, registering noise without recognition, acting only on reaction. There’s a vacancy in his dark eyes that’s unsettling. 

The comms chirps, and Peter finds a message from Vespa, of all people.

_How is he? Does he need medical attention?_

A fitting concern of a doctor, as always. 

**He’s not doing well. He doesn’t seem hurt, or drugged, but he’s…**

**He isn’t looking at me. He’s reacting when I speak but not hearing.**

**I’m worried.**

_Shit. He needs help, yeah. Try to ground him. Give him something to focus on._

_Could be a texture or a smell or a taste or something._

_Take the time you need. Bud says we’re still incognito, no cops to worry about._

Peter scans the Ruby 7 for something to help Juno, but sees no potential solutions in the car’s neat interior. He looks back over at the lady, and sees his hands moving restlessly, grabbing the mesh of the dress he’s wearing and rolling it between his fingers. 

Of course. In a second, Nureyev shrugs off his blazer-- silk-lined wool, soft against his lady’s bare skin but rough enough on the outside to be, hopefully, interesting texturally-- and drapes it over Juno’s shoulders gently. 

He doesn’t respond, not at first. They sit in silence, bubbled away from the rumble of traffic and sirens. 

After a moment stretches into several, Juno speaks. 

“Nureyev?” 

Juno’s voice is rough, cracked from disuse and the strain of earlier events. The way the detective says his name, though, is gilded. He could listen to Juno say his name forever. 

“Yes, love. It’s me. We’re in the Ruby 7, you’re safe.” To his own ears, Peter’s words feel like a flimsy attempt at comfort, but the crease in Juno’s brow softens, and his eyes focus a bit more, looking at the thief’s face. 

He bites down on his lip, fidgets the sleeve cuff of the jacket. 

“Sorry about… whatever that was,” he says, not looking at Peter any more, but over his shoulder instead. 

“Juno, dear, you have nothing to apologize for. We should talk about this, but we can wait until later, if you wish.” 

“Um, yeah. Later.” 

“That sounds wonderful to me.” Peter wants so badly to ask, to push through and understand so he can _fix_ it. The hardest part is knowing he may not be able to, ever. 

“Nureyev?” 

“Yes, Juno?” 

“Can you, um…” he trails off, still looking out the window, never into Peter’s eyes. 

“Anything at all, Juno.” 

Juno moves then, wordlessly, and leans against Peter’s chest. There’s a wet spot down the front of the detective’s dress that the other man feels as it sinks into his shirt, cold against his skin, but he doesn’t mind. Not a single power or deity could have convinced him to do anything except wrap an arm around Juno’s shoulders, card fingers through his curls, and whisper reassurances to him until his lady fell asleep. They could talk later. What mattered now was that Juno was safe. 

**Author's Note:**

> TW: everything tagged (drug use, alcohol). Juno has a panic attack because of sensory overload. There is a scene where someone pulls hair out of their throat. There’s no actual vomit described, but it is mentioned several times.


End file.
